Tuesday 16th April 2024 from 19:00 for 19:30
Abingdon United Football Club (Northcourt Rd, OX14 1PL, Abingdon)

How do magnets work? What are the largest, and the smallest magnets? How do we build super-powerful magnets – and why? In this talk Dr. Bryant will attempt to answer some of these questions via an eclectic tour of his own experience working in the world of magnets and magnetism. He will cover the basic physics of magnets, drawing insight from his work on nano-magnets – engineered assemblies of magnetic atoms, built one atom at a time! Then he will move to the other end of the scale and look at electromagnets and superconducting magnets – including some of the largest and most powerful magnets ever built – and how they are used in science and medicine.

Speaker: Dr. Ben Bryant

Dr. Bryant earned his PhD in Condensed Matter Physics at University College London, where he worked on low-temperature scanning probe microscopy of magnetic materials. As part of his postdoctoral research he moved to TU Delft in the Netherlands, where he worked on nano-magnetism. In 2015, Benjamin gained a research fellowship at the High Field Magnet Laboratory in Nijmegen, where he worked on scanning probe instrumentation, and other experiments, using their ultra-high-field magnets. In 2019, he moved into industry, and is now a senior development engineer at Oxford Instruments, where he works in research and development of superconducting magnets.